More on Modernism

The late, great Paul Fussell once wrote, “A Modernist is a late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century artist or artistic theorist who has decided to declare war on the received, the philistine, the bourgeois, the sentimental, and the democratic.” I’ve been thinking about this shrewd comment after reading Dan McCarthy on modernism and conservatism and after noting Philip Larkin’s views on the subject. What’s especially interesting about Fussell’s view of modernism is its implicit acknowledgement that all of those traits/positions/persons (the bourgeois, the philistine, etc.) can be critiqued from both ends of the political spectrum, and sometimes by people who don’t fit anywhere discernible on that spectrum.

It’s worth remembering that T. S. Eliot, who appears in our minds as a kind of mandarin, was a great fan of the music hall comedienne Marie Llloyd and, later, of the Marx Brothers — as commemorated in the correspondence between him and Groucho. The Eliot of rarefied aristocratic tastes was real; the Eliot who guffawed at pratfalls and puns equally so. It’s worth remembering that his original title for “The Waste Land” was “He Do the Police in Different Voices.”

It was middle-class culture that Eliot was consistently critical of, as were many of the Modernists of his generation, with the signal exception of Joyce, whose Ulysses is among other things a hymn of praise to the thoroughly bourgeois and philistine Leopold Bloom. Eliot’s famous review of Ulysses (quoted by Dan McCarthy) commended Joyce’s “mythical method” as “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” But it is not at all clear that Joyce would have agreed with that description: he was, I think, more concerned to show that the lives of ordinary people like Mr. Bloom were rich and full and that contemporary history, seen from street level, wasn’t futile or anarchic at all: futility and anarchy were, Joyce believed, introduced by the imposition of metanarratives like that of Christianity or of Irish nationalism.

All this to note that Modernists pursued highly non-traditional and often experimental aesthetic forms for different reasons; their dissatisfactions had different points of origin. Joyce was, as he often said, a simple man with simple tastes, fully prepared to accept the good things of a commonplace life without asking for anything more. Eliot was different: he longed for a meaning both permanent and transcendent. He took great pleasure in the comedy of Marie Lloyd, but he could never forget that his education and intelligence had put him beyond the possibility of an unselfconscious absorption in the joys of the music hall. Low culture he could not fully enter; high culture, he came to believe, lacked the power to save. It was only in something beyond culture altogether that he could find peace and rest, and the assurance that “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

First of all, mad props for the handle. Second, indeed, simple men with simple tastes don’t typically produce something like the Wake, but then, neither does anyone else. Joyce’s friends and family consistently agreed with him that he was a simple man with simple tastes — he ate ordinary food, liked ordinary and even sentimental music, and (for the most part) read ordinary books — who just happened to have an enormously powerful mind. He strenuously denied having complex thoughts, and insisted about Ulysses that the only thing complex about the book was its method. The same may well be true of the Wake, but since he was not forthcoming about what he was doing in it, we can’t be sure.

“He strenuously denied having complex thoughts, and insisted about Ulysses that the only thing complex about the book was its method.”

Sorry, I’m having too much fun with this back-and-forth to stop, but it seems to me that that “only” thing is a pretty big thing.

Let me make a comparison – and remember, I speak as a man who loves Joyce. Shakespeare was also a man who, so far as we can tell from the limited historical evidence, had simple, bourgeois tastes and habits. He was not part of the smart set of his day, was a shrewd businessman, are cared a great deal about establishing himself as a gentleman. And he, too, was possessed of a terrifyingly powerful mind.

But he wrote works that were widely popular, in their own time and ever since, while also providing ample material for highbrow critics to puzzle over.

And Joyce didn’t do that. He plainly loved the common tongue, and he had a Rabelaisian sense of humor, but his work is *hard*, sufficiently hard that I know a great many literate and intelligent individuals who have given up rather than finish Ulysses, to say nothing of the Wake.

I agree with you – and with Eliot – that Joyce had a different attitude toward bourgeois life and simple liberality than did a lot of modernists. But that attitude can’t come from what we know about him as a man; it has to come from the work itself. And it does – but it does so in spite of a method that remains extremely forbidding to the common reader. Which means when we assess other modernists, we can’t dismiss them as being “at war” with bourgeois life or democracy or what-have-you merely by virtue of being hard or obscure. Not unless we are willing to tar Joyce with the same brush, and I’m not willing to do that.

And, as an aside, while Joyce may have denied having complex thoughts, Stephen Daedalus would not join in that denial. Much as Shakespeare, the sturdy burgher of Stratford, would never think himself king of infinite space the way Hamlet did. Make of that paradox what you will.

Noah, I agree warmly with most of this and don’t actually disagree with any of it. I think Joyce’s own experience is relevant here because (a) he once was Stephen Dedalus, or someone very much like him; (b) he felt that he had matured by setting aside (with the help of Nora Barnacle) many of Stephen’s intellectual elaborations; and (c) he still had compassion for and interest in young intellectuals like Stephen, and perhaps some older ones as well. He knew, though, that to such people in the modern world he could not use simplicity to commend simplicity; instead, he had to commend simplicity by means of complexity and elaboration. This, I think, is what he means when he says that the thought of Ulysses is simple and only its method is complex. And I think knowing that helps us to appreciate that great masterpiece more fully.